Rush Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Core

The Rush Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Core provides advanced biostatistics and bioinformatics resources to a wide range of clinical and population health researchers within the institution to enhance the capabilities of the research community at Rush.

Technology

The core has built a state-of-the-art computing system in consultation with Rush IS/IT that can support research activities and large databases that can extract the following:

Electronic medical records of patient data

Electronic case report forms from RedCAP data collection system

Biospecimen data

Survey instruments are available on demand to investigators through an onsite implementation of RedCAP.

The core maintains and uses the Research Private Cloud, an innovative set of infrastructure tools. The cloud hosts a MS SQL database storing research-related data and is planned to support virtual environments for researchers, and Hadoop-related tools for Big Data analyses.

The core also has a dedicated computing cluster for genetic, RNA-seq, and next-generation sequencing studies.

Services offered

The core serves the research community at Rush by collaborating closely with population and clinical health researchers and serving as co-investigators on several NIH and foundation grants, including:

CAPriCORN (a PCORI funded common infrastructure for the Chicago region)

Pricing

Core funding

The core is funded by Rush institutional funds with an expectation that the core will be self-sufficient in the next few years. Members of the core are also supported by several NIH and foundation grants.